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The engaged Perry and Brand, at a charity gala last month in Beverly Hills, can’t keep their hands off each other. Photo: Getty Images

It may have been the less than sensual environment of a children’s shoe shop, but that didn’t stop Katy Perry and new fiancé Russell Brand from acting like love-struck teenagers as they browsed the shelves of Cubs, a high-end children’s store in the wealthy London enclave of Hampstead last month. “They honestly couldn’t keep their hands off each other,” a source reports. “They were giggling like a couple of kids.”

The loved-up “Brand and Perry Show” is not an unfamiliar one these days. Whether it’s something as humdrum as shopping for home ware at Target, or dinner in a LA restaurant, the couple behave like two smitten teenagers whenever they’re together. They even dress alike (both have taken to wearing coordinating black and gray) and have special nicknames for each other. His is Owl, in a nod to his intellect; hers is Pussycat, due to her kittenish appeal.

Such is the intensity of their whirlwind romance that, among their circle of friends, the joke now is which will come first — a wedding or a baby. On the latter, Perry certainly likes to keep people guessing. Aside from that visit to the kiddies shoe shop, there have been an endless supply of tweets on the subject, including one last month in which she told her lover he’d been “prego-ed.”

Little wonder that even by the usually kooky standards of attention-grabbing Hollywood romances, theirs has got people talking. For a start, it’s an unlikely partnership. She’s the minister’s daughter come latter-day tease, he’s a comedian- turned-actor nine years her senior and known in his native England for his battle with booze and drugs and his rampant promiscuity.

Yet those who know 34-year-old Brand say that since he met Perry in September he’s been a changed man, even though their romance had an inauspicious start. The couple met when Perry threw an empty water bottle at his head across Radio City Music Hall at the Video Music Awards in the fall. It hit him straight in the head, something of a metaphor for the coup-de-foudre that seized both of them. Within days they were inseparable, and by December a now monogamous Brand popped the question as the couple holidayed in India, presenting her with a ring as they sat on an elephant watching a fireworks display.

It may have seemed sudden, but friends of Brand weren’t surprised. “Right from the start, he said, ‘This is it — I’m completely in love,’ ” someone from his inner circle confides. “He said she had ‘tamed’ him.”

It’s a sentiment confirmed by comedian David Walliams, a close friend of Brand’s, who believes it’s a match of equals. “Normally Russell’s girlfriends are following him around totally in awe of him, but he’s following her around totally in awe. I can understand that because Katy is absolutely knockout gorgeous and really funny, really provocative and naughty. He has met his match.”

Another friend agrees. “Theirs is a meeting of minds. They’ve both got the same sense of the absurd, and their relationship is underpinned by laughter. There’s a huge physical chemistry, of course, but humor is the glue that binds them together.”

He’s also a highly complex one, who’s openly battled heroin and alcohol addiction, as well as bulimia and depression. Born in 1975 in Essex, he was an awkward and unhappy child, brought up by his single mother, Barbara, after his father, Ron, left when he was only 6 months old. He and his mother remain intensely close to this day.

A natural performer, he attended stage school as a teenager, but was expelled after a year for drug use — bad behavior, which would set the pattern for Brand’s later reputation as a man who pushed boundaries.

In 2001, he was sacked from his presenter role with MTV after turning up for work the day after 9/11 dressed as Osama bin Laden. Then, two years ago, a British radio station also fired him after he left a sexually suggestive message on the home voice mail of a British actor.

His personal life has proved equally colorful. He’s been sober and drug-free since 2002, but he has channeled his addictions into a prodigious appetite for sex. One friend describes how a night out with Brand would routinely feature chaotic scenes in which he would start to kiss a girl only to stop and turn to another one right beside her and start kiss her, instead. “It was like, ‘Whoa, you can’t do that,’” he recalls. “Yet he always seemed to get away with it.”

Indeed, Brand seems to inspire huge affection and loyalty among his many discarded conquests. One visitor to his house recalls a note pinned to his kitchen notice board that read, “You broke my heart but I am still smiling.”

Kristen Bell, Brand’s co-star in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” the 2008 film which gained him attention with American audiences, has her own theory. “Russell loves everyone to know that he’s a womanizer and he’s done all these strange things, but I think secretly hiding inside Russell is a very nice boy.”

Keith and Mary Hudson must hope so. Katy Perry’s parents were said to be initially “apprehensive” about their daughter’s new paramour, but it seems that the fabled Brand charm has won them over. Following a vacation together in December, they threw a New Year’s dinner at LA’s Il Cielo to celebrate their daughter’s engagement, at which they declared Brand a “wonderful guy.” At that same dinner, Brand announced that he “cannot wait” to spend the rest of his life with Perry, a declaration about which, friends maintain, he is absolutely sincere.

For those less caught up in this intense modern romance, “one day at a time” might prove a more useful motto.